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Never has a president been so happy to have his signature piece of legislation be defined as a “tax” as President Obama was last week, when that designation created enough room in Chief Justice John Roberts’ mind to craft a means that allowed ObamaCare to stand.

But that three-letter word could come to haunt Team Obama this November, and in more ways than one.

Yes, ObamaCare is indeed a tax — the biggest and most complex in US history — but the tax that will penalize those Americans who refuse to buy insurance may not be the most insidious one in this law. It’s the tax on jobs, full-time ones, at millions of small businesses.

That’s because although America’s small businesses have long dreamed of true health-care reform that would ease the burden of soaring insurance costs, ObamaCare is loaded with new taxes and paperwork that will have the direct effect of raising the cost of doing business for these small companies.

It couldn’t come at a worse time. Although small businesses account for an estimated 64 percent of new hires in this country, they have been much slower than big companies to recover from the Great Recession. The number of new businesses being created in America is down 23 percent from its peak in 2007, according to the Brookings Institution, and confidence among small-business owners, which topped out in 2004, has never recovered.

ObamaCare is a big reason small business has been trailing the overall economy in jobs growth.

ObamaCare does and will continue to raise unemployment in a country that has not seen the jobless rate fall below 8 percent during the Obama presidency. Under the law, small businesses who employ more than 50 people will be mandated to purchase insurance for their employees or face a $2,000 penalty (tax) on every incremental worker they hire. As Diana Furchgott-Roth of the Manhattan Institute notes, this means moving from 49 to 50 uninsured workers would cost a small business $40,000 per year. (Under a wrinkle in the law, the first 30 employees would be exempt when it comes to calculating the tax penalty.) And if a small business goes from 49 to 100 workers, it either has to insure those workers with full-blown heath-care packages, or pay an additional $140,000 to Uncle Sam.

Work the numbers and you can see why ObamaCare may be the biggest jobs-killer ever.

Worse still, the way the law is written encourages companies to hire part-time, contract or freelance employees at a time when some 8 million Americans say they are working part time only because they can’t get a full-time job. The $2,000 per worker tax on employers who don’t provide health insurance also disproportionately penalizes low-wage workers like those who work in retail or at restaurants, since that fixed amount represents a higher percentage of those workers’ wages.

For a city restaurant with 60 employees, each earning about $10 per hour, that would add 11 percent to the cost of a new hire. Add that to the combined 7.65 percent companies have to pay per worker to cover Social Security and Medicare costs, and it’s easy to see that ObamaCare offers a perverse incentive for small business to stay small.

Little wonder a local restaurant owner in my neighborhood says he scuttled expansion plans months ago. Instead, he’s looking at adding an online business that is far less labor intensive. As Ferchgott-Roth points out, the “new law makes it harder for a business with 50 or more workers to compete with a business with fewer than 50 workers.” As policy, it certainly doesn’t make a lot of sense.

Yes, as the law phases in fully in 2014, ObamaCare will serve as almost a perfect storm aimed at what already has been ailing the US job market for almost a decade — a law that discourages the expansion of small businesses, while simultaneously hitting hardest younger workers, low-skilled workers and part-time workers looking for a full-time job.